Epic Announces Unreal Engine 3 Support for Adobe Flash 11

Epic's Unreal Engine 3 now supports Adobe Flash and this may signal a deluge of many popular gaming titles storming their way to web browsers and social networking sites. The Unreal Engine 3 was originally designed for high-end PCs and gaming consoles, but has since been used to develop games on the iPhone like the Infinity Blade series.

In August this year, Adobe announced an early October launch date of Flash 11 and will reportedly introduce a GPU-assisted rendering API called Stage 3D. Adobe claims that it will boost Flash's ability to render 2D and 3D games by one thousand times, enabling "console-quality games". As a result of this development by Adobe, Epic has been able to enhance its Unreal Engine 3 to leverage on Stage 3D and hardware accelerated graphics to deliver its games via a browser with the updated Flash 11 plug-in.

Will this new development herald Epic as an industry leader or will it be just a flash in the pan event? With the relevance of Flash challenged by HTML5, this is according to Microsoft who is questioning the relevance of Flash on the Web with its 'plug-in free' Metro IE10. This may put the brakes on what Epic and Adobe are attempting to achieve - premier 3D games on the web.